What is an AOI equipment

Question – A contract manufacturer today gave me the quote for some rework on PCB. He says that he will charge $150 for the AOI equipment programming. What the hell is AOI Equipment ?

Answer – First – your contract manufacturer may be charging less or way more, depending upon the amount of the programming he needs to do. If your rework required like 100 components, then $150 is cheaper. If your rework is for just 5 components, the $150 is probably way to high.

Now back to your question – the AOI stands for Automated optical inspection and is almost invariably done in automated complex PCB assembly manufacturing. In AOI, a picture of a working board is taken at each component at a specified coordinate. This is matched against the board under test. If the match shows a “significant difference”, the software flags an error. A manual intervention is required to check the cause of the difference.